Giant Crowdsourced Drawing Pulled Ideas Through Kickstarter

Running out of ideas is a situation all creatives have to deal with at some point, but for his latest project, UK-based artist Benjamin Radford has no shortage of material to work with. As part of a web-based drawing experiment called Internetopia, he crowdsourced 220 different ideas over the course of a month, all of which were combined on one huge 6.5 x 5-foot canvas.

People were able to submit their ideas as part of a Kickstarter launched earlier this year, which raised more than $9,000 over its original goal. The size of each persons request was dictated by how many ‘cubes’ a person pledged for, each cube cost $1 and the more cubes a person bought, the more space their idea would take up on the final drawing.

In the end, 3012 cubes were pledged for the drawing, which came together as part of an initial rough sketch on custom designed graph paper. After being inked, the final design was then printed as a limited edition of 300 posters on A1 paper. There are still some of the posters available to buy right here.

It took Radford three months of nonstop drawing to complete the artwork, and he claims on his website, “It’s (probably) the largest piece of crowdsourced art done by a single artist in the whole world.”

The ideas submitted cover a wide spectrum of interests, and give an interesting peak into the mind of people with great ideas, who might lack the artistic skills to express them on paper, or otherwise. Some choice submissions include:

A dragon curled up and sleeping on top of a water tower.

A wrestling match between a taco and a grilled cheese sandwich with an audience of animals wearing business attire

A tipsy octopus, barely in control of its far-reaching arms with a suited man on its head, trying to control it’s arms with very thin thread.

While there was definitely no theme, it’s interesting to note that a total of seven people, who were presumably unrelated, requested cubes dedicated to “Where’s Wally?”